Anybody who has read some of the 400 books that have been written about SOE operations, or have read some of the personal accounts of their experiences by numerous former agents, might be forgiven if they became confused as to whether the typical SOE agent was a ‘civilian’ like the well-known agents of the French Section or whether they were more like the SAS men of the present day. Certainly the focus of public attention has been upon the French Section’s civilian ‘star’ agents like Peter Churchill, John Farmer, Francis Cammaerts, Ben Cowburn and Robert Heslop. Even greater publicity has been given to the Section’s fifty-five women agents, among them Odette Hallowes, Pearl Witherington, Nancy Fiocca and Christine Granville, all of whom survived, and to the eleven brave women who were caught by the Germans and perished after terrible suffering in Nazi concentration camps, women like Violette Szabo, Yvonne Rudellat and Noor Inayat Khan.
Very few people will have heard of the ‘star’ agents of the other Country Sections, such as Knut Haukeld, Joachim Ronneberg, or Jens Paulsson of the Norwegian Section, or of Jan Piwnik and many other very brave Poles; or of the Dutchmen Lieutenant Jan Ubbink and Sergeant Pieter Dourlein who suffered almost as much at the hands of the British, who thought they were double agents after they escaped from the Gestapo, as they did under the Germans. And there were others, too numerous to mention, who served with distinction in the Czech, Belgian and Danish resistance movements. There is a tendency to overlook the large number of British officers and men who fought with partisans in France, Greece, Albania, Yugoslavia and other Balkan countries and never tried to disguise their true identities or their British nationality. There were also some who lost their lives operating in neutral countries in Europe, the Middle East, the Far East and elsewhere.
At a very modest estimate there were 1,200 agents working for various SOE Country Sections in France alone and the total number running around Europe has been estimated by one source as 5,000 and by another at 6,000. Probably half of them worked behind enemy lines in uniform, either of our own or of allied armies. Many of these men belonged to SAS-TYPE units, as, for example, the Free French Savanna and Josephine parties. Some were ‘in and out’ parties like the commandos of the Norwegian Linge Company who provided the ‘Grouse’ and ‘Gunnerside’ teams that blew up the Norske Hydro heavy water manufacturing plant at Vemork and later sank the ferry carrying the entire German supply of heavy water in Tinnsjo. Others were quite literally commandos on raiding missions like the members of the Small Scale Raiding Force.
There was a long-running argument within the upper echelons of SOE as to whether it was better to train servicemen or civilians as secret agents, given that their purpose was sabotage and disruption. In a previous chapter it has been recorded that Bill Brooker, the man whom Philby described as the cleverest man he had ever met, was at loggerheads with Colin Gubbins over this issue and it led to Brooker’s downfall. The evidence indicates that there was continual vacillation between the two types at various stages of the war, reflecting an ambivalence about the agents’ roles that stained the training syllabus. The choice really depended upon numerous geopolitical factors and the precise task which particular agents were required to perform. Some, for instance, were political emissaries like Jean Moulin in France or the SAS-trained Fitzroy Maclean, Churchill’s emissary in Yugoslavia. Some were resistance organizers like F. Yeo-Thomas, Peter Churchill and Francis Cammaert, or couriers, a task for which women were particularly suitable, or radio operators, or weapons and explosive experts, or local co-ordinators with Allied military operations like the Jedburgh teams. Some were servicing a network by providing premises or letter boxes or some other supporting role.
Strangely, very little has been written by or about the most vulnerable of all the secret agents, the radio operators, men and women of many nationalities who were often very young NCOs and who were usually caught by the Gestapo and the Abwehr faster than they could be trained. One expert estimated that more resistance networks were broken up through the capture of radio operators than were destroyed by penetration agents.
The radio sets they used weighed 30 lbs and could not be disguised as anything else. They could be dismantled into four parts each of which was obviously a piece of radio equipment. There were instances when operators were able to convince some inexperienced Germans that they were not radios but recording equipment. These sets could not produce more than a weak signal of 20 watts and needed an aerial 70 ft in length. They needed at least two delicate crystals, one for day and one for night operations and different ones for different transmitting frequencies. In the early days of the war the operator spent several hours a day working the set at the same time of day and in consequence all of them were caught. The Germans, who were better than the British at radio-location, could arrive on the operator’s doorstep within half an hour of the start of a transmission.
The first radio operators were all men, usually selected from our own or from one of the Allied armies and had already received their basic training in morse code from their own people. They received their training in clandestine operating techniques and coding from the Royal Corps of Signals at Thame Park, and afterwards were sent to various towns in Britain for practical exercises in working a clandestine radio. They were billeted on trusted civilian families, previously vetted by MI 5, and chosen not just for their discretion but for the location of their houses and for having a tree close to an upstairs back bedroom window, from which to hang the 70ft aerial. The operators were given brief training in dodging our own radio-location experts who could locate an unidentified transmission in a matter of minutes and could converge on the locality in less than an hour, (compared with the Germans’ thirty minutes). It was not until the autumn of 1941, after a number of them had been lost, that SOE headquarters woke up to the fact that the radio operators were a danger to the organizations in the field. From then on they were given security training at STS 52 at Grendon in Buckinghamshire, but it proved unsatisfactory and in the spring of 1942 it was decided to send them for more thorough security training for 14 days at Beaulieu and they were housed mainly in The Vineyards (STS 35), although some are known to have been housed in The House on the Shore (STS 33).
One of the Beaulieu instructors said he thought that the first batch of radio operators, probably Dutch, to take the security course was housed in Hartford House, the smallest house in the complex, which suggests that there were only two or three of them. Philby mentioned two Dutch radio operators among the earliest students and said that they fell into German hands and were executed.
To keep the wireless operators proficient in transmitting and receiving morse code, it was necessary for them to exercise their W/T skills daily. As anyone who has learned morse code will know, speed can only be achieved when one ceases to ‘read’ individual dots and dashes and the groups of dots and dashes that make up the individual letters. With practice, the individual letters and even groups of letters become subliminal but this facility is very quickly lost if not constantly practised.
The radio operators of different nationalities were at one time mixed together for training in the clandestine subjects. A former Belgian agent radio operator, Jaques Doneux, in an unpublished book of his experiences, wrote that ‘at Beaulieu I found I was one of eight students and this time we were a really mixed bag. There was a Belgian major, a British captain, two British lieutenants, a French lieutenant, a French pilot officer, a Polish woman who wore WAAF uniform and two British sergeants.’ The language problems that this arrangement presented to the instructors can well be imagined.
A large number of operators had been lost through following a strict transmission routine at a regular time of the day and consequently later trainees were taught to move house frequently and were warned that if they valued their lives they should be brief and never transmit twice from the same place, or at the same time of day or on the same frequency two days running. Later in the war they were provided with a gadget to speed up the transmissions.
&nb
sp; Unfortunately, even after security training, a high proportion of the radio operators remained careless and became a danger to their circuits, so much so that circuit organizers were told never to meet them. The result was that the operators were driven into social isolation, became bored to distraction and were driven to seeking indiscriminate company, usually with fatal results. However, many survived their tours of duty, and some survived several tours, like the inimitable Denis Rake of the French Section, the gun-shy and unashamed homosexual (in the days when it was a criminal offence), who survived fantastic adventures and who during one mission lived with a German officer of like persuasion. Between missions Rake did a stint at Beaulieu as an instructor and Conducting Officer.
Some sections, particularly the Poles and the Czechs, who at an early date had built up Home Armies, drew the bulk of their agents from their own people already living in the occupied countries. Presumably these people were already vastly experienced in the day-to-day problems of living and staying alive under the Nazi regime, easily took to clandestine life because it was already part of their existence and therefore stood a better chance of survival.
It is doubtful if, after the war, a proper statistical survey and analysis was made, country by country, of which of the various sources of agents gave the best chances of survival, the SAS type of operative, the commandos, civilians recruited from outside the Nazi orbit and parachuted in or civilians trained in situ for their clandestine roles. Much depended upon the grip which the agent’s circuit or the partisans exercised over their native territories, how rash or cautious they were and the very nature of the terrain over which they operated. In a small, flat, densely populated country like Holland there was nowhere for partisans to hide, whereas in Greece and the Balkan countries there were mountain fastnesses that could be strongly defended, where large groups of partisans could be supplied by air at night and could hide from German troops and aircraft by day. Similarly the arctic wastes of Norway provided large areas in which commandos could hide, providing they were tough enough to withstand the cold weather and were knowledgeable in matters of arctic survival.
There was no one type of background that fitted the agents to operate in all countries. Some were primarily soldiers, including a large number of British soldiers, some were civilian expatriates recruited from anywhere in the free world, providing they spoke the appropriate language fluently, and a substantial number of people, soldiers and civilians, were trained in situ or were brought out of occupied Europe to Britain or North Africa to be specially trained. To cope with such a wide variety of roles the Beaulieu school provided individual tuition or group tuition as required.
The traffic of people into and out of Nazi-occupied Europe during wartime was breathtakingly large and ran into many thousands if one includes all sorts of service and civilian personnel brought out by land, sea and air. In France alone 433 people were secretly evacuated by air using Lysander, Hudson and Dakota aircraft of the Special Duty Squadrons landing behind enemy lines. And 258 agents were ferried in by aircraft. The number of agents dropped by parachute is not recorded but must total thousands. Nor is it known how many agents were evacuated by overland routes. Because of incessant problems with the acquisition of aircraft and operating them at maximum range, the Czechs and the Poles were compelled to send their couriers by long and dangerous overland routes through France and Germany or Austria to keep in regular touch with events in their home countries. The principal routes into Norway were by sea, using a disguised fishing boat, the Shetland Bus, and motor torpedo boats.
Much publicity has been given to the proportion of agents who were caught and killed by the enemy, but their losses were not as great as that suffered by men serving in Bomber Command, where only 10% survived a tour of duty, or men in the D-Day assault forces where casualty rates for some units reached 95%. Indeed those serving behind the lines were a lot safer than the poor devils facing an artillery barrage and minefields on any of the battlefronts. SOE expected a 50% loss of its agents, but its true figure was about 30%, although this varied greatly according to theatres of operations and the stage of the war in which they were committed to operations. The Dutch and the Poles suffered enormous percentage losses of agents. But on balance, for SOE as a whole, more survived than died. A survival rate of 60 or 70 per cent is a tribute not only to their own ingenuity but also to their survival and spycraft training. Although the actual damage they inflicted directly by acts of sabotage was limited, there was one act which is said to have altered the outcome of the war, the destruction of the Germans’ supply of heavy water, putting an end to their atomic research programme. The modest achievements of other direct acts of sabotage must be set against the agents’ success in stirring up resistance among the native populations on a scale that is mind-boggling, to be counted in tens of thousands rather than in a few thousand in each country. And the extent to which the Germans’ war production was crippled by an enormous number of acts of unattributable sabotage can never be measured, but it must have been colossal. Resistance ultimately made it impossible for the Germans to move about outside the main centres of population except in armoured convoys. Life for the ordinary German soldier in any occupied town was made unsafe and miserable.
The evidence of this research indicates that the first batches of agents of the French and RF Sections, and the Polish, Scandinavian, Czech, Dutch and possibly other Sections were drawn from those nations’ commandos. They were trained soldiers posing as civilians during operations and not vice versa. In 1942 – 3 there was a tendency to favour civilians in France, Belgium and Holland, but it seems to have been reversed as D-Day approached, with the parachuting into France behind enemy lines of SAS and at least ninety three-man Jedburgh teams.
There is no reliable record of the nationality of the first students to attend a course at Beaulieu, but in his memoirs Philby mentions that soon after the school opened and before the arrival of the ‘professional’ group of instructors from the Intelligence Training Centre, somebody in SOE had sent an unknown number of anti-fascist Italians to Beaulieu for agent training. Denis Hendy is emphatic that the first students billeted at The Drokes were Spaniards.
The Italians had been recruited from among Italian prisoners of war imprisoned by the British in India. Whether they were military or civilian is not known. Philby says they had been recruited by Alberto Tarchian and that they had been put in the charge of a British officer who spoke perfect Italian but who barked at them. It is believed they were accommodated at STS 35, The Vineyards. There is no record of whether any of these men were ever given any agent training, or what sort of training this might have been. And there is no record of how long they stayed or where they were sent, but it is probable that they were treated in the same way as the Spaniards.
There were twenty-five Spaniards, thirteen of them accommodated in The House on the Shore and the remainder in The Drokes. At The House on the Shore their interpreters were three young men of Field Security, Corporal Geoff Holland, and Lance Corporals Dicky Warden and Bernard Ettenfield. Peter Kemp, a well known SOE operative who retrained at Beaulieu in the spring of 1944, before going to Russia, described the Spaniards as a villainous crowd of assassins, who after being mucked about for years by the British government would cheerfully have killed anyone in British uniform. Bernard Ettenfield, who got to know them well, recalled that they had been selected from soldiers of the Spanish Republican Army who had fled to France when defeated in the Civil War. They had joined the French Foreign Legion and when France capitulated in the spring of 1940 they had evidently managed to escape captivity and had made their way to Britain where they were enlisted into the Pioneer Corps. They were deposited at Beaulieu in about February, 1941, at a time when Hitler was attempting to drag Spain into the war. Our Intelligence services had discovered that the Chief of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, was in Spain in January, 1941, trying to get Franco to allow German troops to pass through the country to attack Gibraltar. While Franco vacillated, SOE
was preparing for action in Spain. Hence its interest in the Republican cut-throats. Hitler’s overtures lasted for many months and the threat of Spain joining the war as an ally of Germany remained a distinct possibility until the Germans began their invasion of Russia in June, 1941.
Bernard Ettenfield stated that the training the Spaniards received was intended to keep them busy and out of mischief; they did not receive any training in spycrafts or for specific missions behind enemy lines. Denis Hendy stated that they remained at The Drokes, (and presumably also at The House on the Shore), for at least three months, which is far longer than any of the later students who were being trained as secret agents. He confirmed that the Spaniards were kept busy with some sort of commando training, especially physical training and weapons training, and in their off-duty hours they seem to have spent much of their time playing football with the Durey boys, Denis aged 12 and his younger half-brother aged 6. They used to frighten Mrs Durey by upending the smaller boy, suspending him over a water butt and generally being over-boisterous with the boy. According to Hendy, one of the Spaniards, named Pollanca, had the most appalling scars down one side of his body from injuries sustained when a hand grenade exploded near him during the Civil War.
When the professional instructors arrived at Beaulieu in April, 1941, they were appalled at the prospect of teaching the Spaniards to be secret agents. Cuthbert Skilbeck, one of the senior instructors during this period, said that nobody knew what to do with them; they were frightful people and impossible material to turn into secret agents.
They were eventually sent away early in May, 1941. Some went with Geoff Holland to Manchester for a parachute course, but most of them were returned to the Pioneer Corps for normal duties with the Corps, probably as labourers. A long time afterwards, after the war, Bernard Ettenfield went into a restaurant in London and found one of them serving as a waiter.
Beaulieu Page 12